Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

I made my way inside the miserable, old mansion, and up the staircase, to the room where Lilia had slept the last two nights. Once I’d gathered her cellphone and suitcase, I headed back toward the foyer, and stopped alongside the portrait hanging on the wall, of me, my father and Caed. I remembered the day it was painted. Caedmon and I had gotten into a silly argument over a girl at school that I’d kissed. One he was particularly fond of. In the portrait, my face held a smug expression, while his undoubtedly held back the anger burning inside of him. Ten days later, a week after our seventeenth birthday, my brother was dragged from that closet, and I never saw him again.

And yet, he was alive.

First thing in the morning, I’d begin my search for him.

I carried Lilia’s suitcase down the winding staircase to the foyer, and as I reached the door, a prickling cold danced across the back of my neck. Turning around showed a figure mostly hidden in the shadows behind me.

“Caed?” I asked, squinting past the darkness that concealed him.

The obscure form stepped forward, illuminated by what little moonlight shined through the windows, and my suspicions were confirmed.

An ache stabbed my chest, crushing my lungs. Muscles locked and stiff, I dropped Lilia’s suitcase on a hard thud.

Fuck.

It was him.

Standing in the hallway like he’d never disappeared from the house.

As if I’d been transported sixteen years into my past, he looked no different to me. Perhaps slightly aged, but beneath all of that was the twin I remembered. Half my soul staring back at me like a dark reflection in the mirror.

The brother I’d prayed for every night, for years.

“Hello, Devryck,” he said in a voice as stoic as his expression.

Crystals of shock spun around my muscles, leaving me frozen in place.

Alive. My brother was alive.

Fucking alive.

My pulse thundered a deafening beat in my ears, as I stood stupefied, staring back at him, silently calculating the statistical improbability of the moment. “You haven’t changed,” was all I could manage, as if even my vocal cords were paralyzed.

With a sneer, he lowered his gaze, picking at his palm. “Oh, I’ve changed quite a bit.” Eyes that mirrored mine trailed over me. “But so have you, it seems. Gone is the boy who wouldn’t dare touch a corpse.”

“I’ve since found peace in death.”

“As have I.” As simple as his words might’ve been, they swelled with the weight of pain. Suffering. Whatever torment I couldn’t possibly imagine that he’d endured.

“I thought you were dead. I saw a video of them torch–” The word choked in my mouth, and I shook my head, refusing to slip into that memory again. “They sent what I thought were your ashes.”

“Angelo had a flair for the dramatic.”

“You’re telling me all of that was fake?”

“Oh, it was real.” He lifted his pant leg, where every inch of his shin was marred in grotesque scars. “As I said, a flair for drama.”

“Where’ve you been?” The stream of questions swirling inside my head was endless. I felt like Lilia, bombarding him with one after the next.

The repulsed curl of his lip told me I didn’t want to know the answer, which only amped the rage burning in my blood. “I see you’ve done well for yourself,” he said, ignoring my question. The hard edge in his voice gave breath to the animosity that must’ve ground him every day, thinking how different our lives must’ve been. A stark contrast of pain and contentment. Death and life.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” I asked, ignoring his comment also. “Why stay hidden?”

“I want nothing to do with a Rook.” He spat the word like a bad taste on his tongue, his eyes blazing with bitter resentment. “You’re one of them. One of him.”

Whether he was talking about our father, or Lippincott, I couldn’t tell.

His jaw shifted, his hand balled into a fist. “You whored yourself out for power.”

“Is that what you think?” The accusation in his words stirred my own anger. This was hardly the reunion I’d dreamed of for so many years. “I was fucking dying! Have you forgotten?”

He twitched and rolled his head on his shoulders, rubbing the back of his neck. The reaction had me frowning. “You would’ve never survived the shit they did to me.” A haunting darkness clung to his words, and he twitched again, as if he was short-circuiting before my eyes. As simple as the comment was, it felt like a blow to my chest. “You’re nothing. A rich, prick asshole, and nothing more.” He rested his hand against the holster at his hip.

Frustration escaped me on a mirthless chuckle. “You let me believe all these years that you were dead. And I’m the asshole? That’s rich. Who the fuck do you think took the brunt of our father’s rage? Who do you think he blamed every minute of every year that followed, huh?”

While he may have looked the same, a replica of me, the man standing before me was not the brother I remembered and loved. Whatever hell he’d suffered had turned him colder, detached.

“So you got cozy with Lippincott. Even went so far as to fuck his only daughter. Is that how you learned how to forgive him?” A malicious smirk lifted the corner of his lips. “Maybe I should’ve fucked her, too.”

The fury exploded inside of me, and I curled my hands into tight fists, the will to keep my temper in check gnawing at my spine.

As if sensing my anger, he tipped his head and smiled. “Oh, it seems I’ve found a weakness, Brother.” His anger made no sense to me. His desire to taunt left me baffled, as I fought the urge to smash his teeth. “She tell you I watched her sleep? How easily I could’ve fucked her, pretending to be you.”

“I’d have fucking killed you myself for touching her.”

Something flashed over his face, and he twitched again. “What’d you say?” The tone of his voice dared me to say it again.

I wanted to, just to see what the hell he’d do, but something told me he was waiting for that. Much as his words goaded my violence, I didn’t want to fight him. “What the hell did they do to you, Caed?”

His spine snapped. Like a bull seeing red, he barreled straight into me, the shock of pain from where I’d been shot spiraling up my arm into my neck. The impact knocked me to the floor on a jarring zap that struck my spine. He scrambled over top of me, his pupils blown, crazed like a rabid animal. In a haze of blinding rage, he hammered his fist into my face, kicking my head to the side. As he drew back for another hit, I slammed my stronger fist into his flank with a sickening thud, and the moment he curled himself into the hit, I twisted to the side, knocking him just enough to plow another punch to his jaw.

We rollicked across the floor, all fists and growls, until I got the upper hand and pinned him beneath me. I pounded two quick punches to his temple. Another spurred blood from his nose. A hint of a smile played on his lips like he enjoyed the hits.

I railed another to the other side his face, and he let out a sound of pleasure.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I drew my fist back again, but a sharp blow struck my ribs, knocking the wind out of me.

He drilled another powerful blow to my wounded shoulder, and I shook away the jagged flashes of pain that flickered behind my eyes. The moment of distraction cost me, as Caed plowed me over again, knocking me onto my back, and in two quick moves, he propped his blade at my throat, bringing my movements to a halt.

The razor thin edge of the knife scraped against my stubble, casting a slight burn where he must’ve cut me. Body shaking with adrenaline, I stared up at him, into eyes that held so much enmity and hate, I was certain he’d slice me open. “Impervious,” I gritted, the rims of my eyes stinging as I lifted my chin, giving him full access to my throat.

His brows came together in a tight frown, and his cheeks twitched as if the emotions inside his head cross-wired.

“Impervious,” I said again, and eyes screwed shut, he shook his head.

“No.” A rage-filled growl vibrated out of him.

“Do it. Kill me.” I kept on with my taunting that seemed to be breaching the haze clouding his head. “The day they dragged you from that closet, my whole fucking world caved in, and I’ve been living in death ever since.”

“Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” He pushed off me and clutched his temples, as if something rattled inside his head. A war between his thoughts and my words. “Shut the fuck up!”

He was coming undone.

I fought the emotions brimming to the surface as I watched it happen before my eyes. Decades of pain, confusion, and anger. Anger that I had to stuff into the quiet recesses of my head, hardening my heart. “You were my protector. My whole fucking world.” Voice faltering, I cleared my throat.

He scrambled away and backed himself into the wall beside us, where he struck the butt of his knife against his temple and whispered something in a string of incoherent words that I couldn’t make out.

“You remember, don’t you?”

Another angry growl broke from his chest, and he punched his temples harder. “Shut up!”

I reached for his arm, and he recoiled, scrambling away.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” As he held the blade out toward me, I caught the high shine of tears in his eyes. “IamashadowIamaghostIamnothingIamashadowIamaghostIamnothing,” he whispered over and over.

“You’re no ghost, nor shadow. You are my brother.” I edged closer, careful to keep some distance between me and the business end of that blade. “It’s me, Caed.”

The blade trembled in his hands as he held it outstretched. His eyes shifted with unseen images, as if memories came flooding in too fast to keep up. The hard edge of his jaw loosened, at the same time his brows turned up. Jaw trembling, he lowered his weapon and let out a pained growl that echoed over the clang of his fallen blade.

Palms clamped over his ears, he whispered the string of words again.

I lurched forward and wrangled him into a tight embrace. A harsh blow struck my chest as he tried to push me off, and fuck, my shoulder felt like it was on fire, but I didn’t let go of him. I held firm, while he snarled and growled like a cornered dog, pushing and clawing for escape. A searing burn licked my flesh where he dug his fingers into me, both of our muscles locked and trembling in paralysis–a balance of two opposing forces.

Until, at last, he relented.

He let out a pained sound and gripped my arms. “Fuck! Fuck!”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He finally broke.

I fought tears as I held him, listening to the sounds of agony that broke from his chest. Whatever he’d been through had ravaged his mind, no differently than the parasites that infected my victims. It was clear to me that he’d somehow been brainwashed into thinking I was his enemy. That I was somehow responsible for what he’d suffered. Whoever had taken my brother had broken him into an animal. A cold and callous machine.

He quieted again, and when he lowered his hands from my arms on a shaky exhale, I released him.

I fell to the side, against the wall.

We stayed that way, in silence, for a minute or two, while I wrapped my head around what the fuck could’ve happened to him to make him this way.

He daubed the blood from his nose with the back of his hand, smearing it over his upper lip.

I yanked the sheet covering the console table next to me and slid it across to him, using the other end of it to daub some of the blood from my shoulder.

“D’you get shot?” he asked, wiping the blood from his lip with the corner of the sheet.

“Lippincott.”

“His trigger finger is pinned to the wall of his office, next to his ears.” He drew his knee up, resting his elbow there. “He held a gun to my head once. Told me he’d put a bullet between my ears.”

“Tell me what happened to you.”

Twitching again, he rubbed the top of his skull. “So much of that day, with you, is gone now. Things I remember come to me in flashes. Like flickering scenes of a movie.”

“Someone kept you imprisoned. Who was it?”

“Angelo had me chained up in some abandoned building somewhere.” His voice carried an aimless drawl, as if his mind were lost to memories. “Lippincott showed up. Told him our father refused to make the deal. So, Lippincott told him to get rid of me.”

Frowning, I tried to imagine the level of betrayal Caed must’ve felt. The hopelessness. “You should’ve let the parasites kill him slowly.”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t take a chance he’d live. I vowed to kill them all.” He swiped up his blade and pressed the tip of it into his palm, toying with it, which drew my attention to scars even there. His entire hand was riddled with them.

“No way Angelo let you walk. What happened?”

“I was sold to some rich prick out of Massachusetts.” He stared off, as if his mind had taken him back to that day. “He was part of a sadistic group. A society of rich and powerful men, like The Rooks. Only they weren’t academics. They made sport of torturing people.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, hesitating to ask more. But I needed to know. I needed to understand what he’d suffered. Even if I had to live it myself. “They tortured you.”

“It was him, mostly. But I didn’t break as easily. I had this crazy fucking notion that I was going to get out of it. That I’d escape.” He snorted and drew a bead of blood on his palm, where he continued to toy with the knife. “He saw that as a challenge.”

“He brainwashed you.”

He pressed his forehead against his bicep and breathed deeply, as though he needed a moment to collect himself before answering. Something told me this was the part that’d messed him up. The stretch of his history where everything had changed for him. “He found out I had a twin,” he said, lifting his head again. “At first, he told me he was going to find you and sell you to those sadist pricks. When that didn’t seem to work on my psyche, he began to feed me lies. Not outright. It was a slow-drip feed.” Frantically rubbing the back of his neck, he inhaled hard through his nose. He twitched and grunted, fighting some invisible force inside of him. “He’d go for days without feeding me anything else. I’d get delirious, seeing shit. He started invading my dreams with images of you siding with Lippincott. Worse things than that, too.” His voice cracked, and he shook his head. “I can’t even think about that shit.”

Part of me wanted to know what could’ve been worse than betrayal, but the other part of me thought it better left alone. Fuck. No wonder he wanted to kill me. He must’ve thought I’d conspired against him all these years.

“When I finally gave up the idea of trying to escape, he began to reward me.” His voice held a tight clip of disgust. “Like a fucking dog. Little by little, he fed my loyalty to him. To them. It wasn’t long before I forgot who the hell I was. That’s when he made me kill for him. I became his protector. His guard dog.”

I thought back to the report I’d been given, about him having murdered the businessman back in Massachusetts. “You killed him?”

The repulsion on his face faded for a gratified smile. “Killing sounds merciful for what I did to him.”

“Why now? After all these years?”

“A few weeks back, I attended a meeting with him. Some bigwig pharmaceutical CEO. Another member of Schadenfreude.”

Schadenfreude. I knew the word to mean something about pleasure from another’s suffering. Must’ve been the name of the society he’d mentioned earlier.

“He’d met with Lippincott about buying some research for a breakthrough treatment.” Goddamn. The shady deal The Rooks had gotten wind of a while back. The conniving bastard was behind that the whole time, and he’d let Darrows take the fall for it. Eyes still spacey, Caed shook his head. “Soon as I heard that name, something snapped inside my head.” He rubbed his skull back and forth. “It hooked my fucking guts, and I couldn’t let it go. It brought to mind Angelo and the pricks who’d swiped me up. I couldn’t fucking see past this blinding rage. For the first time since I was seventeen, I wanted to kill them all.”

“You pretended to be me to get close to Lippincott.”

“Imagine my surprise when I found Barletta in that cell, too. Then you delivered Angelo, and it was like Christmas fucking morning.”

“You planned to kill me, too,” I dared to say aloud.

Lips snarled and trembling, he lowered his gaze. “I don’t know what I would’ve done. That’s what scares me.”

“And now?”

“I’m trying to flush it down the mental fucking toilet over here, so let’s just move on, okay?”

I snorted at that. Then chuckled. My chuckle became laughter, and when I looked over at Caed, he was laughing, too. The laughing became hysterical, a release of something I couldn’t even pinpoint exactly, but it felt good. Purgative. I laughed until I was wiping tears across my arm, and it died down to quiet again.

Both of us stared off.

“Remember when we were kids, and dad would lock you in that closet? You’d hear voices talking to you?” he asked, his tone calmer than before, sounding more and more like my brother.

“Yeah.”

“What’d they tell you?”

I pulled my knee up, resting my elbow atop it. “They told me to run. To get as far away from our father as I could.”

“But you didn’t. You stayed, and you endured every punch he threw at you.” Sniffing, he thumbed at his nose. “When they threw me in that dank, cold fucking cell, I heard a voice, too.”

“What did it say to you?”

“It told me to stay alive and to kill them all. But it wasn’t the voice of dead people. It was your voice I heard.”

Brows pulled tight, I swallowed down the emotions constricting my throat.

“I wouldn’t have killed you. I wouldn’t have killed my own blood.” His throat bobbed, and he pushed to his feet, holstering his knife again, as I stood up from the floor.

“So, what happens now?” I asked, rubbing the muscles around the bullet wound that ached like a bitch. “You plan to stay here on Dracadia?”

Weary eyes held the vacancy of a man who’d fulfilled his vengeance and hadn’t thought what would come after. “This place, this life, isn’t for me. I never wanted it.” Those bleak words wrapped around my lungs and squeezed the breath out of me.

“You’re leaving, then.”

“Yes.”

I lowered my gaze to stave off the agony threatening to rip me apart all over again. “Where will you go?”

“Don’t know. Away.”

I shook my head, my jaw tightening with stubborn protest. “You can’t leave. Now that I know you’re alive …”

“I need to figure shit out, Dev. My head isn’t right.”

“There’s money. Plenty of it. I can set up an account.”

“I don’t need your money. I need to find a reason to live again.”

Gaze lowered, I rubbed my hands together and released an uneasy breath. It troubled me that he needed to get away from me to set himself straight. I didn’t want to think about what he might do at the end of that journey. What he might find there. I hoped there’d be enough to keep him from deciding he was better off dead, but I knew that pain. I’d clung to that rope once myself, feeling my grip loosen. “If it’s time you need, then go. But for fucks sake, Caed, promise me you’ll come back if it gets too heavy for you. Because …” Scowling, I blinked back tears. “I won’t lose you again.”

After a moment of stillness, he scratched the back of his head and strode toward the door, but came to a stop beside me. With what seemed like reluctance, he held out his hand.

I reached for him, and the moment his palm hit mine, I pulled him in for a tight hug, holding him against me. An image flashed through my mind: lying on the floor, bleeding out of my skull after my father had struck me too hard, and Caedmon’s arms wrapped tight around me, telling me I’ll be okay.

Impervious.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “If you stay, I swear to Christ I’ll protect you this time.”

He gave one hard squeeze. “You let him convince you of his lies, Brother. You were never weak. Not to me.”

I gripped the back of his neck, not willing to let go.

At the sound of the door, I lifted my gaze to see Lilia standing there, her eyes wide as she took in the two of us. “Oh. God. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …. You were taking a while, and I got worried–”

“I was just leaving.” Caed released me and, with determined strides, kept on toward her, grinding to a halt beside her. “You’re about the feistiest little fox I’ve ever met,” he said and leaned into her, whispering something in her ear that I couldn’t make out.

With a smile, she lowered her gaze and nodded.

A quick kiss to her cheek, and he glanced back at me. While his comment earlier was likely nothing more than an attempt to piss me off, I still felt a wire of tension in my muscles having seen his lips on her. “Give my best to Chairman Winthrop.” The tone of his voice carried a threat. “If he even thinks to retaliate, I’ll have reason to return.”

“I suspect he’s reeling from humiliation right now,” I said, as Lilia padded across the room to my side and slipped her arm in mine. “Take care of yourself. Maybe send some proof of life every now and then. And Caed … if you ever need me. I’m here.”

His brow flickered, but he said nothing in response.

And with the click of the door, he was gone.

“Are you okay?” Lilia asked, giving a squeeze of my hand.

“I will be.” I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed her knuckles. “What did he say to you?”

“He just said that I was too beautiful to fret over this scar. And that I should look out for you because you’re all he has left.”

Brows pinched, I pressed a kiss to her forehead. “He’s right. You’re far too beautiful.”

“Do you think you’ll ever see him again?”

“I don’t know.”